A Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and a Hollywood actor cross paths at a coffee shop in San Francisco’s Financial District.

You’d never know by appearance alone, but one of these men will sleep on the streets tonight.

Scott Glover and Marc Roth are feeling quite comfortable at this branch of Peet’s Coffee. Roth tells me that the homeless spend hours on end in coffee shops, which offer optimal shelter on chilly days like this one.

Scott Glover and Marc Roth (L-R)

Glover is in town for a three-day gig providing protection detail at the annual Veteran’s Day Parade. His current employers don’t know he’s homeless. Roth is no longer living in shelters, but he can relate to his new acquaintance’s transience. Until last year, he was living in his car, in hostels, the BART (for one night after he missed a curfew), and in shelters around San Francisco.

But Roth is a startup founder now. And in true startup fashion, he reels off ideas for future business ventures minutes after I arrive.

His ideas are in various stages of development and include a food delivery service, a laser company, and a hardware accelerator program. But they all have one thing in common: Whatever he does next, Roth intends to hire from within the homeless community, which he views as a hotbed of untapped talent.

How did he move out of the shelter and into TechShop?

One wintery morning in 2011, Roth awoke after a rough night in a homeless shelter in San Francisco.

It was Christmas, and Roth was determined to make a change for the sake of his two kids living with their mother in Las Vegas. He had originally relocated to San Francisco to build a better life for his family, but had developed nerve damage and a condition called Meralgia Paresthetica from standing for hours on end at a pizza restaurant. This condition left him with medical bills so steep, he was soon unable to pay rent and return to his job, and he found himself on the street.

Source: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

A quilt and printer at San Francisco’s TechShop

When he spotted a business card for TechShop in the shelter’s garbage bin, it seemed like a sign. Intrigued, he fished it out.

TechShop, a membership-based do-it-yourself workshop, provides tools, equipment, and classes for the community. The San Francisco venue is one of the hubs of the burgeoning “maker movement,” the trend to employ DIY techniques to develop unique technology products.

For a glimpse inside TechShop, don’t miss our gallery below. 

“I had these inventions in my head but didn’t know I could make them myself,” Roth explained. So he spent his remaining dollars on a membership and a few introductory courses.

Roth’s goal was to pick up basic skills like woodworking, laser cutting, CNC machining, and welding. His first core discipline was 3D printing, the process of making a solid object from a digital model, as members don’t need to pay for the materials.

“I was studying 10 or 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” he recalled.

This drive was born of necessity, but Roth soon discovered he had a natural aptitude for it. The opportunity to “make something” appealed, given that he had spent much of his career as a C Sharp programmer. C Sharp is considered a bit outdated today; the most popular and employer-friendly languages are Java and Python. ”My skills didn’t port to the cloud,” said Roth.

Fortunately, TechShop was catering to a different kind of entrepreneurship, and fueling a kind of “Renaissance” for hardware startups. So it didn’t take long before TechShop’s most dedicated member began to receive requests for help.

A number of other makers desperately needed an extra pair of hands to get their prototypes developed and products shipped on time. Many of them were freshly-minted after successfully raising funds for their projects on sites like Kickstarter. A dab hand with a laser cutter, Roth could charge upwards of $20 an hour.

Within a few months, Roth was able to move into a house for startup founders. Chris Fornof, a TechShop member and community builder at 3D gesture controller company LeapMotion, paid his rent for several months “purely out of the goodness of his heart,” Roth said.

He sent a good portion of his earnings to his family in Vegas and started making plans to relocate them to the Bay Area.

OpenROV cofounder David Lang at TechShop

“Marc had this tenacity, commitment to learning and re-skilling,” said David Lang, a member of TechShop who started taking classes around the same time.

Similarly to Roth, Lang’s living situation was unstable. For the past year or so, he had resided on a sailboat in Berkeley, Calif. After discovering TechShop, he saw an opportunity to reinvent himself as a maker.

Lang learned how to build robots and work with machines in less than six months. His first project, a mini submarine for amateur ocean exploration called OpenROV, raised $111,000 on Kickstarter. Lang would later hire Roth on a contractual basis.

By this time, makers were starting to get mainstream media attention. Lang recently launched a second Kickstarter campaign to fund a book on his experiences.

A maker, remade

Fast forward a few years to spring 2013. Roth is now an entrepreneur with a funded laser company. He threw himself into design with such gusto that he’s an Autodesk instructor, consults for LeapMotion, and teaches seven classes at TechShop.

Most importantly to him, Roth still regularly interfaces with the local homeless. He’s a living testament that the right program can make all the difference.

His dream is to build his own version of TechShop called “the Learning Shelter” that specifically caters to the homeless. He envisions a venue with shower facilities (a desperate need in the city), accommodation at a nearby church, computers, equipment, 3D printers, and an openness to any and all ideas. He claims to be already in the early stages of discussions with Autodesk about potentially donating computers.

Roth and business partner Matt Stollenwerk unload a laser cutter for new business “SF Laser.”

But the maker movement is no quick-fix solution, in part because existing homeless programs aren’t ready to embrace it. “With few exceptions, I’ve heard nothing but resistance from shelters,” said Roth.

One of the exceptions is Project Homeless Connect, a nonprofit that caters to the roughly 6,500 homeless people in San Francisco, according to a recent count (I use the word “count” in the literal sense; the actual number is thought to be far higher.)

Director Kara Zordel said the main goal is to help the homeless develop the skills they need to take job openings at tech companies. “If they were just given a little training, they could apply,” she said.

Can the tech industry be a true “meritocracy?”

Zordel believes the tech community has a responsibility to its most underserved population. After all, technology is supposed to level the playing field; we often hear the term “meritocracy” bandied about.

However, homeless people have scant access to computers. To make matters worse, it’s exhausting to simply secure housing. If a homeless person isn’t lucky enough to win the lottery for a 90-day bed, they are forced to queue up for a one-day bed. Those with the best shot have stood in line since 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. the previous night. Good luck competing in a meritocracy if you haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a safe place.

Glover, who met Roth through a mutual friend, has not been lucky enough to secure a bed for the night. At this juncture in our conversation, he hands me a resume and shows a video reel for his acting work. He doesn’t ask for anything but a job. “It feels like we’re stuck in this cycle,” he said.

And there’s another challenge — the lack of self-belief after being told “no” for so many years. Roth tells a revealing story about a friend from a shelter who needed to be coaxed just to admit his life’s goal to open a chicken restaurant. “People aren’t comfortable seeing themselves as creative,” he said. “They just don’t see their own potential.”

With the Learning Shelter, Roth’s goal is to shine a light on the true face of homelessness and a community that is plagued with misconceptions. “I worked hard all my life, but the world changed,” said Roth. But he adapted — it just took $49 for a month’s membership, a 3D printer, and an open door policy.

As Roth wrote on his profile in TechShop’s meetup group, “I haven’t had a bad experience with anyone I’ve met here. I’m so at home here.”

• Want to help the homeless? Attend the next meetup for homeless innovation. Zordel tweets one request a day for a homeless adult or child — search and share via the hashtag #EDCDailyNeed. 
• Interested in joining TechShop? Check out our feature here. 
• Eager to learn more about the Maker Movement? The Maker Faire takes place on May 18-19 in San Mateo, California. 

TechShop images via Dylan Tweney; Marc Roth and Scott Glover images via Christina Farr

Curious opened the digital doors on its marketplace for lifelong learning today to connect teachers and students interested in continuing education. The site contains more than 500 short, interactive, video-based lessons ranging from beer brewing to conversational French.

Founder Justin Kitch previously founded Homestead which was acquired by Intuit in 2008. During an interview with VentureBeat, he said education has always been one of his passions. He studied ed-tech in school and considered becoming a professor before he went the startup route. He took time off after the acquisition and realized the weak state of online learning while searching for a guitar teacher. Despite the fact that there were great teachers out there, they didn’t necessarily have the resources or tech-savvy to market themselves online. Kitch built Curious to provide these teachers with the tools to distribute, share, and monetize their lessons.

“I created this platform to help teachers become entrepreneurs,” he said. “Great teachers often have no clue how to sell their lessons online and right now there is no place for them to do it. I want to lift up the state of the art of the industry and give teachers the scaffolding they need to focus on creating great lessons.”

The online education space is a crowded one but Kitch said Curious is different because it focuses explicitly on lifelong learning. Sites like Khan Academy, Coursera and Udacity are bringing the world of higher education online and Lynda.com is geared towards people looking to bolster their professional skill set. Curious is not about academic learning. Instead it focuses on education that enhances your lifestyle and interests. If you want an introduction to Roman history or master computer programming, Curious is not for you. Those people looking to improve their scrapbooking skills or make perfect pesto may find something to their liking.

Kitch said that right now, most lessons of this sort happen on YouTube and teachers struggle to reach a large audience and make money off their work. For teachers, Curious offers a Lesson Builder that helps teachers create compelling, “bite-size” lessons, group them together into series, and add related materials. Teachers can adopt their own teaching style and use the platform to build their unique brand and gather a following. Students benefit from well-produced, accessible lessons that align with their interests.

During his research, Kitch found that learners respond best when they can tune in whenever the want, when the videos are short, and when the teachers have a strong screen presence. He set out to recruit 100 of the best teachers he could find across YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and offline and word quickly spread through word of mouth. Teachers are required to fill out a short application and send a sample video, and once they join, can use Curious has a place to build a legitimate business. Teachers use the platform free of charge and Curious takes a 30 percent cut of what they make.

The company has raised $7.5 million to date led by Redpoint Ventures and is based in Menlo Park, California.

Photo Credit: Curious

Online course providers typically target students, but Udemy is going after an underserved group: professionals.

The San Francisco-based company launched “Udemy for Organizations” today to help companies train their employees. The available courses include soft skills, like people management and public speaking, as well as training in common programs, like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Excel.

A small business might decide to buy twenty licenses for the marketing team to refresh their understanding of Excel — Udemy offers a popular Excel for beginners and intermediaries online course. Alternatively, if the CMO has been knee deep in spreadsheets for years and has knowledge to share, employees can create their own Udemy course.

The company will be rolling out its new corporate training and development program during the coming weeks.

Udemy COO Dennis Yang

“We have formal education on our platform — but much of it is skill development and life-long learning,” said Dennis Yang, Udemy’s COO, in an interview.

Udemy is one of the well-known providers of massive open online course — dubbed “MOOCs.” While it’s rival Coursera has focused on enlisting lecturers from top colleges like Harvard and Stanford to teach college-level students, Udemy has excelled at professional and corporate training.

It’s also a potential revenue opportunity; Yang said it’s free for customers to register to Udemy, but the company charges for some courses. In future, they will consider offering a site-wide license for larger organizations.

One of the biggest challenges for MOOCs is to convince people to take courses for the sake of learning. For this reason, Coursera received widespread attention from educators and policy-makers when a handful of its courses were approved for college credit. A few months later, a landmark bill was proposed in the Senate to force California’s public colleges and universities to give credit for online courses.

Yang said they will leave it up to the organization to provide “branded recognition” for employees that pass one of its corporate development courses. The hope is that employees will earn promotions and salary boosts by picking up new skills from Udemy, and continue to enroll in its online courses.

Top image via Shutterstock

NovoEd students at the Open University of West Africa computer lab in Ghana.

Studying at Stanford no longer requires maintaining a near-perfect GPA while captaining three sports teams, running the high school newspaper, volunteering with a child literacy program, mastering the cello, serving as student council president, finding a solution to world hunger, and $225,000.

NovoEd launched today to make access to courses from prestigious educational institutions available to anyone, starting with Stanford.

The company started out as Venture Lab, a project run by a Stanford professor and a PhD student to make online learning more social, experiential, and interactive. Many Stanford professors were interested in taking their courses online but said presenting material in that format did not allow for the degree of interactivity they desired. Using a combination of techniques in crowdsourcing, design and analysis of reputation systems, and algorithm design, NovoEd’s platform enables collaboration and peer learning. The classes are built around team-based exercises that require students to exchange ideas, communicate, and evaluate each others’ work.

“The platform is designed to map more closely how the world really works,” CEO Amin Saberi said in a Q&A. “It promotes higher engagement and accountability among students through several social processes designed to give them a meaningful sense of activity and membership in a learning community. Together, they create a force that maintains students’ attention, interest, and engagement throughout the course.”

Saberi is an associate professor of management science and engineering. He founded Venture Lab with PhD student Farnaz Ronaghi, whose thesis focuses on creating social incentives in online learning. The first class offered through Venture Lab was titled ‘Technology Entrepreneurship’ and attracted more than 80,000 students from over 150 countries. They formed teams to execute the assigned projects, which required them to use skills in problem solving, communication, and leadership. The top 200 teams found mentors to help them develop business plans, and the top 20 teams pitched their ideas to venture capitalists. The course ultimately led to the creation of multiple companies around the world, and Saberi said a few have even received funding.

The success of Venture Lab encouraged Saberi and Ronaghi to take a leave of absence from Stanford to pursue NovoEd full-time. Starting today, Stanford University will use the platform to offer seven courses to the general public, as well as 10 private courses available only to current Stanford students. Course topics are diverse and include ‘A crash course on creativity,” “Mobile health without borders,” and “Finance.”

Online education portals like Coursera, Udacity, and Khan Academy have disrupted the world of education by making classes available to anyone with an Internet connection and the desire to learn. These Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) lower the barriers to entry and the costs for students that want to boost their resume, develop a new skill, or nurture a side interest. However, one of the disadvantages of online education is isolation — students are not learning in a classroom environment where they can come together to challenge each other, problem solve, and exchange ideas. Saberi said the ability to work with others, cultivate leadership skills, hone communication abilities, and negotiate one’s role in a team are just as important as the content itself.

“I keep telling my students that if you graduate at the age of about 25, you can expect at least four decades in the workforce and the world is going to change four or five times in that time,” he said.  “Because of this, you should not think that you can just rely on the materials that you learn today. It is more important to learn how to address and solve novel and complex problems and to collaborate and communicate effectively to implement the solutions. We need more creative thinkers, leaders, and team players.”

To achieve this goal, NovoEd has raised seed funding of an undisclosed amount from Costanoa Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kapor Capital, Learn Capital, Maveron, Ulu Ventures, and a number of angels. The startup has seven employees and is based in Menlo Park, Calif.

Photo Credit: NovoEd

Eduson.tv launched an online business education portal geared towards people in BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries to help them improve their skill sets and earn a degree.

The company describes itself as “Coursera for business students.” Students have access to a number of courses and can take them at their convenience. Lessons include videos and slides, case studies, reading materials, and tests, as well as real-life stories from business professionals. The course offerings include those led by business school professors, expert guest speakers, and free courses featuring existing content from people like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, Tony Hsieh, and Tim Draper.

Founder and CEO Daria Zimina said in a statement that there are 60 million managers in BRIC countries who need business to advance their careers, and Eduson.tv will make high-quality content accessible to them. The most popular option is a full MBA, and individual course titles include “Introduction to Strategic HR Management, Understanding the Share Purchase Agreement” and “Raising money from VCs.

Eduson is in the process of expanding the class list and adding in new features, like a networking tools. The company raised $1 million from abel invests, including the founders of Groupon Russia, although the founders are “expecting to generate revenue since day one.” Although one-third of the courses are free, others charge enrollment fees and Eduson pays royalties to the lecturers. The goal is to add one new course a week. Read the press release.

Photo credit: Screenshot

Education is already accessible online. Now it’s going open source too.

Nonprofit edX is less well known than Coursera and Udacity, its for-profit competition. But it also offers online courses from top universities for free.

Today, the organization is making available some of the code that powers its site open source. EdX announced that it will be releasing source code to its XBlock software on GitHub under the Affero General Public License.

Anant Agarwal, the MIT professor who serves as edX’s president, said in an interview that online learning is the “greatest innovation in education since the printing press.”

This is a first step toward open sourcing the entire edX software platform, a vision Agarwal has been committed to from the beginning. But for now, the interactive course modules built around this code will only be usable with the edX service.

Edx was founded by MIT and Harvard, and has subsequently grown to 12 university partners. Founded in 2011, it is one of the pioneers of massive open online courses, dubbed “MOOCs.”

Educational institutions and independent developers can use the code to deliver a collaborative learning experience — not just simple text and video. In the future, edX plans to offer consulting services, similarly to RedHat for Linux, to bring in additional revenues, which it will share with its university partners.

One of edX’s major goals is for universities to offer credit to students who complete a course. Along with its competitor Coursera, edX is working with the American Council of Education (ACE) to recommend courses that are worthy of college credit.

In California, online education is being widely-discussed as a potential solution for budget-strapped colleges. With thousands of students unable to register for oversubscribed courses, a bill has been proposed in the Senate to force the state’s colleges and universities to give credit for online courses.

photo credit: National University via photopin cc

A bill is under consideration in the Senate that would force California’s public colleges and universities to give credit for online courses.

It’s not clear whether it will pass, but the bill appears to have achieved a desired consequence already in sparking debate. Darrell Steinberg, the president pro tem of the Senate said he introduced the bill to ensure that “no college student in California will be denied the right to move through their education because they couldn’t get a seat in a course they needed.”

If if succeeds, this would be the first time a state is mandating that universities grant credit for courses offered by third-party providers, making it a landmark bill.

Coursera is one of the massive open online course providers, dubbed MOOCs, that is working with state legislators and local educators to improve student matriculation rates.

“This bill comes from a realization that the situation for many California students is really in crisis,” said Daphne Koller (pictured, above), cofounder of online course provider Coursera, who was called in to help structure the bill in the preliminary stages.

Coursera, EdX, and Udacity will likely provide the eligible online courses to help students progress through college. A faculty-led panel will determine which 50 introductory courses are the most oversubscribed and will recommend that online versions of those courses be available for credit. A student would only get credit from a third-party provider if the course is full at their college or university.

Due to budget cuts, thousands of students are on the waiting list for a basic and introductory algebra class, which is a requirement. This prevents many students from graduating from a four-year degree program on time.

Senator Steinberg, a Democrat from Sacramento, told the New York Times that the state’s 112 community colleges each had an average of 7,000 enrolled students who were on waiting lists, and at the 420,000-student, 23-campus California State University, only 16 percent of students graduate within four years.

It’s a problem that isn’t confined to California. An estimated 37 million people in America have some college experience, but no degree.

A handful of Coursera’s online courses were recently approved for college credit by the American Council on Education (ACE), ahead of its competitors. The problem, which Koller refers to as the “bottleneck” is that colleges still need to accept those credits for transfer.

Universities are realizing that it’s not the best use of resources to have multiple instructors teaching the same introductory calculus class when Coursera has an accredited online version.

“MOOCs have a huge role to play in addressing the quality and capacity issues we’re seeing in the California education system,” said Koller.

Gov. Jerry Brown has been a huge supporter of online education as a means to reduce college costs. In November, Brown made a comparison between the University and California and the U.S. Postal Service, both “venerable institution[s] being upended by digital change.”

However, it’s not clear whether the bill will pass. Innosight Institute researcher Michelle Rhee-Weise said it may prove to be highly controversial, especially among students and faculty.

In the short-term, schools may allow students to enroll in an online course, rather than one of their own oversubscribed classes. But it’s not a solution to solving California’s education woes.

“These low-level courses are really the largest source of revenue for the university because [they're] large classes often taught by grad students and a few instructors,” she said. “I think that universities will have a hard time letting go.”

Likewise, students across the country are experiencing budget cuts and may view this bill as a quick fix. Thursday, a group of students will rally to combat downsizing at the City College of San Francisco.

“They feel like the only reason their class sizes are too small is that their funding was cut in the first place,” said Charlotte Hill, a current student at the City College. “So [the bill] ends up feeling like a long-term privatization strategy.”

Former California state assembly nominee Kai Stinchcombe said the structure of independence built into the University of California charter may pose a problem, especially if the bill is met with grassroots opposition.

Koller said we have a long road ahead and advised the government to support a “blended learning” format, meaning a combination of face-to-face classroom methods with computer-mediated activities.

“I think this is an important first step to solving a critical need, but it’s not the full solution to combating high student dropout rates,” she said.

Top image via Coursera 

The courses offering certificates are the following, but this list is expected to expand rapidly:

The dearth of software engineering talent was a hot topic in the technology community in 2012. Pluralsight has raised $27.5 million to bolster this small but necessary population.

Pluralsight is an online education platform for software developers. It offers a selection of 400 training courses for individuals and businesses looking to boost their programming prowess. Categories include C#, jQuery, iOS and Android, Java, and Ruby as well as design, social media, NoSQL, business intelligence, and Salesforce.

Sharp programming skills are a huge asset to individuals and businesses alike. But the supply is smaller than the demand, and thus, startups and incumbent companies are perpetually competing to capture developers wherever they can. In response to the growing need for a large, trained talent pool, an array of training courses have cropped up ranging from cheap options found in large online education portals to pricier bootcamps.

Pluralsight costs $29 a month for subscription-based access to its extensive library of articles, videos, and other training materials. The company was founded in 2004 as a classroom-based education service and moved entirely online in 2008. Since then, it has more than 200,000 users around the world.

This is the first time Pluralsight has taken outside investment. The support from Insight Venture Partners will enable Pluralsight to meet the high demand for content and expand its library. Pluralsight is based in Utah. Read the press release. 

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Wizur makes you wiser. It’s a nice slogan for a web site that allows you learn new things, from how to do sales to taking college courses that you never had time for.

Wizur is part of a trend toward using technology and the plenitude of internet content to educate yourself. It isn’t a substitute for college, but it indexes all of the free and paid courses that available online for you to take on a wide variety of subjects.

“We want to make education easy,” said Sado Lulu, co-founder of Wizur. “Right now, it’s not easily searchable on the net.”

The site went live three months ago and it has 3,000 users a month with no promotion. I met Lulu in September at a lunch at the Plug & Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, Calif. Lulu, who has since returned to El Paso, Texas, co-founded the company with Brendan Morris to give people a chance to educate themselves.

“This started a long time ago for me in college, when I was much of a good student,” Lulu said. “One day, my friend recommended a book to me. I read it. It changed my life dramatically. I’ve been on a constant hunt for education. If I can create that for other people, put them on the path for self-improvement, and create that hunger, I’d be a very happy man. If my friend hadn’t done that for me, I wouldn’t have been like this. I want to make that happen for someone else.”

Lulu started working on the project last year while he was in Germany, and he began developing it in earnest nine months ago. He raised $10,000 from friends and family. The programming work has been contracted out to teams in the Philippines and Pakistan. Now Wizur has indexed 8,000 courses in higher education, and Lulu says he has 3,000 more coming.

The site has ratings that should help people decide whether a course is worth its cost or not. The goal is to have 20,000 educational products, from eBooks to courses, within a year. Lulu wants everyone to do more reviews so the best can rise to the top.

“We want only unbiased reviews,” Lulu said. “You won’t waste your time on a bad education. You can focus on getting a good education. You can find the best courses on any topic you want to learn. You don’t want to waste your time and money.”

There are other education sites out there. Khan Academy has been successful attracting millions of visitors to its site. People have watched more than 216 million lessons to date. But much of Khan Academy’s lectures are short talks on a single subject. Lulu wants to offer entire courses from a teacher.

“We are not talking about small courses or videos,” he said. “We want full courses, worldwide. This could be good for top performers, who want to take themselves from awesome to super awesome. And it is also for the beginners.”

The mix includes both free and paid courses. If they’re paid, Wizur can make money through an affiliate referral program. The competition varies from Khan Academy, which covers a broad swath of subjects, to Good Reads, which is focused on books. Udemy is a competitor in terms of offering courses, but Wizur has indexed Udemy’s courses. Wizur has just a couple of people now and it has a long way to go, but Lulu is hoping that publicity will help the company get on the fast-growth path.

Lulu said that he sympathizes with Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and his effort to give students money to forgo college.

“I’m not going to hate on people who want to go to college, but I am with Peter on the need to teach yourself,” he said.

“A year ago, online education was something people would look askance at, as a not completely respectable form of education,” says Daphne Koller, Stanford professor and co-founder of online education site Coursera.”Now it’s something which every institution is figuring out how to use and how quickly.”

Antioch will offer local support and facilitation from an instructor wrapped around Coursera MOOCs.”Students get Antioch credits for an Antioch course,” Koller explains “but the Antioch course makes extensive use of these pre-existing, high-quality, on-line materials. It’s like teaching a course from a very rich text-book”

Coursera has come along way since its launch a mere nine months ago. The site has educated 1.75 million students (I am one of them. I took co-founder Andrew Ng’s 3-month Machine Learning course) and offers 200 courses from 33 top universities. It’s not all IT and business either, although the Introduction to Finance course is the site’s most popular with 130,000 enrolements. The Modern World: Global History since 1760 had 70,000 takers and “Modern & Contemporary American Poetry“, which Koller says is a hard sell even within universities, boasted 33,000 students. One third of students come from the U.S followed by India, Brazil, Russia, Canada and the UK.

Coursera addresses some of the biggest problem in education: the lack of capacity in many areas of the world, the soaring cost of university education in Western countries and the drop-out rate in the U.S, which can have serious financial consequences for students. “If you don’t complete your degree your return on investment is negative, ” Koller states. “It’s important to give people the opportunity to made headway in a low-cost, low-risk way.” In fast-growing economies like India and Brazil where tradition institutions simply cannot scale to meet the demand for graduates, education may take on completely new forms. “Some of those countries will leapfrog brick and mortar institutions in the way that those countries have leapfrogged landlines and moved directly into cellular,” says Koller.

The teaching revolution won’t just happen abroad. Online education will also change how students are educated on-campus in the U.S. “In 10 years or sooner we will look back at the days when we shoveled 300 students into an auditorium to lecture at for 3 hours a week as ‘Wow! I can’t believe we actually did it that way.’ ”

Koller told me that teaching online and offline are completely different paradigms with different strengths. Trying to replicate face-to-face teaching online was never going to work. Online courses have flexible timetables and operate on a different scale. Scale can actually be an advantage online since students form diverse and cooperative communities which help each other to learn. From this point of view “Larger classes are, in fact, better than smaller ones,” Koller explains. 

The Antioch announcement is also the first stage in building Coursera’s business model. Institutions will be able to license Coursera’s materials and integrate them into their own offerings. Other revenue-generating features likely to be offered are charges for course completion certificates and employer referrals, where employers pay for introductions to graduates of relevant Coursera courses. This could be a good investment. The top three data scientists on Big data competition site Kaggle, for example, are all graduates of Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course on Coursera.

Revenue would also allow Coursera to pay the universities, and by extension, the instructors who create the online course materials. Could Coursera create global professorial “rock stars” in the way that the gramophone allowed musicians to reach a global audience?

While Coursera needs to be self-sustaining and has already raised $16 million in funding, Koller still sees it as primarily a social enterprise whose objective is educating the world. “In 3 years I would like to offer most of the curriculum in most disciplines, from the best universities, to everyone around the world for free. Wouldn’t that be really cool?”

Ironic, isn’t it, that one of Coursera’s slogans is “Higher education that overcomes the boundaries of geography, time, and money.”

Coursera, which was started by Daphne Koller and Andre Ng, two professors at Stanford University, currently offers 198 college-level courses for 1.7 million registered students, or “Courserians.” The project is funded by legendary venture capitalist John Doerr, of Kleiner Perkins, and Scott Sandell, a VC at NEA.

The organization’s goal is similar to MIT OpenCourseWare, except that Coursera is for classes from top universities all over the world.

A spokesperson for the Minnesota’s department of education told The Chronicle, a journal of higher education, that Minnesota Statutes 136A.61 to 136A.71 prohibit Coursera from offering instruction in Minnesota. Those regulations have been in place for “at least 20 years,” but, the spokesperson insisted, covered both offline and online education.

If that’s the case, Minnesota legislatures were ahead of their times, at least in some ways.

Coursera, of course, says the legislation was intended only for degree-granting institutions and that no other states have similar restrictions. But the organization has been forced to amend its terms of service, which now include:

Notice for Minnesota Users:

If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.

That, of course, is as ridiculous as it is ineffective. Coursera is delivered by the free and open Internet, so unless the state of Minnesota wants to start censoring the Internet, good luck.

I wonder if MIT OpenCourseWare is next on the hit list. While the Khan Academy should be safe — most of its courses are not university-level — I guess the lesson here is to never underestimate the power of bureaucracy.

Even over space and time.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Docstoc, the online library of small-business documents, is giving its users a new kind of content: high-quality, beautifully produced videos that will give small and medium-sized businesses an MBA-level schooling in how to build and grow their companies.

In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat, cofounder Jason Nazar told us that for this new library of courses, Docstoc tapped experts in topics ranging from account to software to marketing as course instructors, and then the company brought a kind of magic unique to Los Angeles tech startups: production.

“Folks in the Bay are better at building technoogy products, as a whole,” he said. “But in L.A., there’s a focus on the quality of content that there isn’t in the Bay.

“The video, the copywriting — there’s an expectation of standards. What we’re trying to do is differentiate our content that’s better than anything else you’ll find out there on the web in terms of the instructor, the content, the production, and the technology platform.”

With video editors on staff who have previously worked on major motion pictures, Nazar said, “The way that they look from a directorial perspective is different from anyone else in the country. We can produce something that’s network-quality. … We’ve built out a really beautiful studio in Santa Monica, and we have the ability to work with instructors remotely.

Last year, the L.A.-based startup started testing video content, producing 1,200 individual videos featuring hundreds of topic experts. The videos were released free of charge on YouTube, and Nazar said the response from Docstoc users was overwhelmingly positive.

Video was also a big part of a 30-app iOS package Docstoc release free of charge back in May.

Nazar said content covers the three main concerns he encounters from the SMB owners he talks to: how to get more customers, how to raise capital, and how to efficiently manage a growing business, whether that business is a solo freelancer or a 100-employee company with $1 million in annual revenue.

Here’s a sneak peek at the new sections of the site:

“Our goal is to identify the most valuable content that will help people, and keep building breadth around that,” said Nazar.

And as for the instructors themselves, the longtime entrepreneur has tapped one of his best resources. “Quite honestly, it’s my own personal connections,” he told us.

“We’ve been around for a while, so people know me. We’ve hosted events in SoCal that have brought in over 15,000 people. For the last three years, I’ve been reaching out, and a lot of those folks are going to be working with us around courses.”

Of course, tons of online video resources are out there for learning about these topics: options range from accredited universities with online course modules to competing websites that also dish out clips and courses. When it comes to competition, Nazar said, “I don’t think there’s any secret sauce we have; we just have high standards. When someone teaches a course, they have to have had real success in that area themselves.”

For example, Jeremy “ShoeMoney” Schoemaker, a widely known affiliate marketing expert and blogger, is teaching the Docstoc affiliate marketing course. The person teaching the site’s AdWords course was the media buyer for LegalZoom. While Nazar said instructors aren’t always household names, he said they will always bring certifiable experience to the table.

“All our courses are taught by people who’ve had the kind of success you want to have yourself,” Nazar said, “people who have sold multiple companies for millions of dollars.

“My overall thesis is, explain the concept, then get really specific. Give an action plan, and give as many analogies as possible that people can identify with. Do everything you can to pass on your knowledge to someone else. When you get to something really dry like Quickbooks, it’s harder to make it interesting, but that’s our educational philosophy.”

Aside from the quality of instruction and the quality of production, Nazar said a lot of thought and effort was put into the site’s user experience and the technology platform itself. He also points out that these courses come packaged with a slew of documents, articles, forms, and other collateral an SMB owner would need to take action on what she learned from the videos.

Docstoc currently has around 20 courses available to its paying customers (access to premium content costs $20 per month) and plans to add 25 more courses to the library by the end of the year.

Top image courtesy of lightpoet, Shutterstock

The leaders of Pure Digital Technologies simplified video camcorders and revolutionized the market for amateur video with the Flip Video pocket camcorders. Now they’re back with a plan to improve supplemental education (think online tutoring) with crowdsourced lessons.

Ariel Braunstein and Scott Kabat have founded the education startup Knowmia to provide students with a freemium service that resembles a combination of the Pandora music streaming and Yelp reviews. Only they’re collecting the best online video lessons on K-12 educational topics and making them easy for students to access. It’s not an easy road, and many education startups have failed to revolutionize learning. But it’s certainly an ambitious project by a team that saw great success in the past. (Cisco bought Pure Digital for $590 million in 2009).

Braunstein and Kabat started their San Francisco-based company in 2011 and spent months talking to teachers and others in the education ecosystem about what is wrong with public education and how to enhance it with supplemental learning.

“As a father, I was interested,” Braunstein said in an interview with VentureBeat. “We saw that there was a special magic when a teacher and a student have chemistry. Unfortunately, it’s hard to make that scale.”

So their idea is to find the best online lessons — or have teachers create them — that students can view via an iPad video app. So far, they have collected a library of 7,000 videos. They are also creating curated minicourses or lessons that drill on a particular subject. Most of the videos are available for free, but students can pay for the minilessons. Parents can also pay to track a child’s progress.

“It’s personalized, affordable, and time efficient,” Braunstein said. “Anyone can cherry-pick videos. But we try to layer value on top of them.”

Braunstein was the cofounder of Pure Digital, and Kabat was its marketing executive. The two of them have raised an undisclosed amount of money as seed capital.

They believe the secret lies in curation. They want to find the best content from the best teachers. They want more than just popular educational videos. They want to find the content and get the teachers to create minicourses that enhance what is already out there in the public domain. The teachers get to share in the cut if the video lessons sell well. The courses include teacher comments and quizzes. Each video has tags and most subjects have “sub” subjects for deeper lessons. Categories include “basic” or “advanced placement.”

The global education market for supplemental learning, such as tutoring, is about $54 billion and is projected to double to $104 billion by 2017, according to Global Industry Analysts. The U.S. market is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 16 percent as parents try to deal with a weakening public education system reeling from budget cuts.

“No one that we’ve talked to today has said that the system is working well,” Braunstein said.

But he thinks technologies such as broadband and the iPad have the potential to create a significant shift, putting more control of education in the hands of parents and students. Paper-based textbooks also seem like they are on the decline. Knowmia competes direct with other online education sites and in-person tutoring.

Over time, Braunstein hopes to distinguish his company’s lessons through adaptive technology, which measures how well a student has performed and adapts the course work difficulty as needed.

Knowmia is in its public beta as a web site and it will introduce new features in the fall. Teachers can register with Knowmia to post the video lessons at no cost. They can use the free Knowmia Teach iPad app for assistance in creating their lessons if needed.  The company is enrolled in the current class of the Y Combinator incubator program, which provides seed capital from its Start Fund. Braunstein said the company will consider additional funding.

Udemy is an online learning platform that offers videos and live lectures from hundreds of expert instructors. It includes courses in technology and business, with headings like “Ruby on Rails for Beginners” and “An Entrepreneur’s Checklist”, as well as more traditional subjects like “Ancient Greek Religion” and “Psychology 101″. In addition to academic subject matter, the site includes lifestyle, arts, sports, and music classes.

Udemy enables anyone to enroll in or build a class, intending to “disrupt and democratize the world of education”. Instructors can use video, PDFs, PowerPoint, audio, zip files, and any other relevant materials to share their expertise with the world.

“Students and instructors come to Udemy to make moves, and every iteration of our product aims to help them make those moves more powerful and more efficient,” said Eren Bali, CEO and co-founder Udemy. “We’re constantly hearing from users who got promoted or changed careers after completing one of our courses — that’s why we’re so invested in creating a learning environment that helps them realize their goals.”

The new features include a responsive full screen user interface, a Quora-style question and answer facility, a progress meter, time stamped notes, and a personalized course discovery engine that recommends classes based on each student’s interests. There are both free and paid courses and teachers can actually earn money. Last year the top 10 instructors garnered $1.65 million in combined sales.

Udemy launched in 2010 and received $3 million in a first funding round last year led by Groupon investors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, with support from 500 Startups and MHS Capital. While many online learning platforms exist, such as Khan Academy, 2tor, Udacity, Pathright, and TED Ed, Udemy is one of the few platforms where the teachers (and thus the company) generate income, by taking a cut off all the paid courses. Lynda.com has a similar revenue model and brought in $70 million last year. Finally, teaching has become lucrative. Now if only the same were true of studying.

Academia can be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor, and one that’s not entirely necessary in this age of do-it-yourselfers and 20-something billionaire entrepreneurs who mark “high school” as their highest level of education completed when signing up for that Amex Centurion Card. That doesn’t mean college doesn’t have plenty of worthwhile morsels for the inquisitive mind to absorb, but the financial barrier is just one of many restricting the majority of Americans to lower levels of learning.

Enter AStudyIn.com, an ongoing compilation of courses and talks in video form from the world’s best schools, available gratis to anyone with an Internet connection and a little motivation for self-enlightenment. The name itself is a nod to the idea that knowledge is boundless, allowing the user to fill in the blank with whatever they want, like Mad Libs. For instance, mine would be a “A Study In The History of Santa Claus and Vampires,” but less important things like business, chemistry, and neuroscience are also viable options.

VentureBeat sat down with Mary Wu, AStudyIn’s founder, to briefly discuss the origins of the concept, the difficulties of an educational startup, and how to incentivize getting your learn on. Mary was previously an investment analyst at a top banking firm, and is currently a digital media analyst at Apollo Group, a global leader in higher education.

VentureBeat: Education is a pretty brave field for a new startup to tackle. Please explain your method to this madness.

Mary Wu: The purpose of AStudyIn is to provide universal education to everyone. Right now it’s leveraging the internet so that anyone anywhere can access premier education. So we have content, talks and lectures from the top schools. We have lectures from Harvard, MIT, Stanford and so forth. And it’ll be great for individuals who aren’t able to go to these schools, to come on the website and watch the videos. That’s one segment. The other is for high school students, primarily seniors, who are selecting schools. They’re trying to figure out, “Hey, should I go to Stanford or Harvard? I wonder what their course content is like.” So these are our two groups.

Another motivation for AStudyIn is to incentivize people to learn. I personally feel that there are two groups of people. Individuals who are inherently motivated to learn and study, and another group who need that extra little push to be curious about something. I think an analogy would be going to the gym. For me, you know, I can tell myself, “I’ll go to the gym sometime, maybe tomorrow.” But I never really do, because I don’t have that incentive to. I’m lazy now, but I want to go to the gym in the future. It’s the same thing for studying. I do want to learn, just not right now. So what AStudyIn tries to do is to encourage people to study right now by providing an incentive system. Right now our incentive system is to reward individuals for watching our videos. However long you spend on our site watching the video content, then you get points for that, and you can translate those points into rewards.

VentureBeat: What is entailed in the process of putting an initiative like this together? How far have you come, and how far do you still have to go?

Wu: The idea originated in the beginning of January of this year. I started working on it one week later. At first it was just a test run, an experiment to see if I could actually do it. And it became this huge project. So I initially used… Well, I still use a content management system. And then I got a programmer friend to help me with some of the harder aspects. We started putting videos on there, and initially it was just lectures. Then we thought, well, that’s kind of narrow, what if people have other interests? So we expanded to talks and then to some short videos that we call “shorts.”

We have some strange, out-there videos that we thought were kind of wacky. That’s where the website is right now. We’re still trying to publicize. And in the future we hope to get more schools on there, more video content obviously, and to…actually go to, maybe, high schools and try to target the students there, the seniors. Right now we have some stuff, we tried to get some attention on high school forums, but I think we really need to try to expand in the high school area a lot more.

VentureBeat: Have you reached out to collaborate directly with any colleges, and what has the reaction been to that?

Wu: We haven’t yet, just because we’re still developing our website. I did consider the idea of partnering with colleges. I think a major barrier would be that… Many of the colleges now, especially the top colleges, have their own website, and they’re posting their own content. I think our website would kind of be competition towards them. So what we do is curate all the schools, right? You’re not just going to this one school, you can go to one place, check out all these schools. I think for the colleges… I mean, it’d be great if we could partner with them, but from their angle they might feel that it might not be such a good idea if students can see their competitors, which would be the other colleges. So that’s one challenge.

So far I’ve only watched The Brief History of Santa and The Science of Sex Appeal, then I started drawing monsters in my notebook before asking to go to the bathroom — so I can attest that AStudyIn does provide a realistic school experience that’s startlingly reminiscent of my own, though your results may vary. You can visit AStudyIn for more information, and GamesBeat will be delving into the gamification aspect of the site in a deeper interview later this month.

At VentureBeat, we come across a lot of funding news every day. In order to bring you the most information possible, we’re rounding up the quick-and-dirty details about the funding deals of the day and serving them up here in our “Funding daily” column.

Square may be raising a new round at $4B valuation

Mobile payment startup Square is said to be raising a new round of funding that would value the company at a whopping $4 billion. Square has already raised $137 million Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital, and Khosla Ventures, among others.

Eucalyptus secures $30M investment

Open-source cloud software maker Eucalyptus Systems has raised $30 million in its third round of funding. The company offers an open-source software platform for private and hybrid clouds. Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), led the round, with Benchmark Capital, BV Capital, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) participating.

AdSafe gets funding to keep your ads off porn sites

AdSafe Media has raised $10 million in funding to make sure your company’s ads don’t intentionally wind up in potentially embarrassing places such as porn or pirating sites. Pelion Venture Partners, Atlas Venture, and Coriolis Ventures participated in the round.

Coursera goes back to school with $16M

Shaking up online education and bringing university courses to anyone with an Internet connection, Coursera grabbed a $16 million investment. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was the venture firm behind the investment.

Cyphort raises $7M

Stealthy Cyphort filed a form D Wednesday for what appears to be a new $7 million funding round. The company fights cyber threats for government agencies and business with software.

CircleUp grabs money for crowdfunding

CircleUp has raised $1.5 million from David Topper and other investors. The company launched its service today, which helps startups get funding from wealthy investors —  those that make over $200,000 in yearly income or have a net worth of more than $1 million. Instead of focusing on tech startups, CircleUp helps investors give capital to consumer product companies.

TransferWise gets funding to shake up currency exchanges

TransferWise closed $1.3 million in funding for its scheme to sidestep the banks using cheap, peer-to-peer currency exchange. Among the new investors is Max Levchin, the co-founder of PayPal.

SkySQL raises $4M

SkySQL has raised $4 million in first-round funding. SkySQL consults with businesses to set them up with MySQL and MariaDB database services. OnCorps led the round with Finnish Industry Investment Ltd., Spintop Ventures and Open Ocean Capital. The full release is below.

Boxing image via Flickr user djclear904

“Imagine a future where the top universities are educating thousands of people,” said co-founder Andrew Ng in an interview with VentureBeat.

Ng and co-founder Daphne Koller started Coursera with three classes in fall 2011 from Stanford. For at least one of the classes, Ng tells me, there were 100,00 students enrolled. In typical online course fashion, lectures were video-taped and there was a discussion forum for students to get help or discuss concepts. Koller and Ng were blown away by the forums: Thousands of students were conversing about their course work, with question response times averaging at 22 minutes. Because of the sheer volume of students from around the world, someone was almost always online to help.

Cousera is expanding its offerings now, with more than 30 classes to choose from in a wide range of disciplines. The company has partnered with Stanford, Princeton, University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan, and University of Pennsylvania to bring professor-created classes online.

Aside from offering free courses to the masses, Coursera’s learning management service (LMS) platform can be used internally by universities to revamp their online course programs. The plan is to shake up how most college classes are typically run —  with long, boring lectures. Ng and Koller believe that short online video lectures and interactive assignments, provided with Coursera’s LMS, will open up more time in classrooms for discussions, case studies, and more riveting presentations that will keep students engaged.

If Coursera reminds you of Khan Academy, you’re not far off. The company feels it’s similar to the service, but instead offers online college-level classes designed and taught by professors. Students also sign up for classes on a schedule, so they are all taking the class at the same time and can rely on others to help them understand the material.

The new funding round will be used for the infrastructure of the service. Koller and Ng are the educational brains behind the Coursera, but now they need technical help and will be hiring engineers to build out the website and LMS.

Coursera is based in Palo Alto California and was founded in 2011.

Graduation cap image via Shutterstock

In a classic episode of The Simpsons, Homer changes his name to “Max Power” and declares to Bart and Lisa, “Kids, there’s three ways to do things: the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way!” Bart asks, “Isn’t that the wrong way?” And Homer replies, “Yeah, but faster!”

The belief that using the Internet to teach the same old college material will magically fix higher education is the equivalent of believing in the Max Power way — “Let’s keep doing education wrong, but faster!”

Heavyweights Peter Thiel and Vivek Wadhwa are still debating the importance of college for young people, with Thiel encouraging youngsters to drop out and Wadhwa insisting the successful college dropout entrepreneur is a myth. But the underlying flaw of higher education has largely been ignored. And until this problem is addressed, adding a layer of technology simply streamlines the delivery of a flawed product.

College has two customers, the students and the labor market (employers). For the vast majority of students, the number one reason for attending college is to improve their career prospects. While top schools such as Stanford and Harvard still succeed in serving this purpose, the ability of schools to deliver a better career drops precipitously when you move off the uppermost tier.

When college evolved from the “ivory tower” model that was designed for the upper crust of society, it failed to adapt to the needs of the populace who are less interested in intellectual conversation and more interested in getting a job.

Today we have hundreds of thousands of students spending several years and tens of thousands of dollars they can’t afford graduating from low-tier and mid-tier schools, but those institutions actually do little to help their alumni’s prospects.

For example, many years ago, I was on a porn set (I was not performing) and struck up a conversation with one of the actresses (I lead an interesting life). I was somewhat horrified but not entirely surprised to find out that she had graduated from the same university and with the exact same degree that I had. Clearly, our college had grossly failed to improve either of our careers.

For students, this inability to deliver significantly better income after graduation can only be seen as a complete failure. Customer Number One has not been well served.

The second group of customers that colleges must serve has essentially the same goal as the students. Employers want to hire qualified people as much as graduates want those jobs.

But instead of producing graduates with the skills employers need, the American college model tends toward encouraging an almost random education that has little bearing on the demands of the labor market. This disconnect has resulted in a credibility gap between what a degree is supposed to provide and what employers feel it’s actually worth.

Simply applying technology to this system or offering unaccredited classes online isn’t enough. It is imperative that any alternative to the current structure earn the trust and respect of employers.

This is where online learning typically falls short. While it may be cheaper and faster than a regular university, private employers often give even less credit to the value of these credentials.

Meanwhile, four-year colleges continue to believe that their role is to grant seemingly generic degrees that most companies couldn’t care less about while they teach curricula that are often designed in total isolation from employer feedback.

This misalignment has resulted in thousands of well paying jobs going unfulfilled and talent wars over qualified workers — and all the while, colleges are cranking out a labor force with few applicable skills. Clearly, Customer Number Two has also not been well served.

Until universities put the needs of their customers above their dogmatic devotion to what constitutes a “proper” education, no amount of technological streamlining or making classes available online will significantly improve the shortcomings of our current system.

And any technology that doesn’t address these core failings will provide only marginal improvement, perhaps making things a bit cheaper but not much more effective. Any proper disruption of higher education would involve changing these entrenched beliefs and implementing a system that focuses on colleges’ true customers by giving students and employers the results that they want: credibility in the labor market.

Solutions that don’t address this by earning the respect of employers are mostly doing things the “Max Power way” — delivering the wrong education faster.

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author and former stand-up comic.

Image courtesy of pav197lin, Shutterstock

Getting a degree online has become in-demand in the last decade, as more people want to get an education at a time that’s convenient for them. While colleges such as University of Phoenix have worked their way into the mainstream for online learning, long-standing universities have also tried to get in on the action. But, for colleges that have traditionally catered to offline learners, getting online requires a lot of work and infrastructure. 2tor entered the market hoping to provide “school-as-a-service” tools for top-tier, prestigious colleges to offer online degrees.

2tor has partnered with University of Southern California (USC), Georgetown University, and University of North Carolina (UNC) to offer online degrees. Only a select few Master’s degrees are offered; social work and education at USC; nursing at Georgetown; and government and business at UNC. Instead of having to relocate across the country, you can earn a Master’s degree from one of the schools pretty much anywhere in the world.

The company helps colleges create online courses, provides an online environment where students can access their courses, invests in schools to make their programs work, and supplies schools with infrastructure that handles student sign-up, course registration, and graduation processing. Instead of typical online classes, where lectures are videotaped or assignments are placed on a message board, 2tor uses webcams to connect students with their professors and other students. 2tor even offers mobile apps so students can stay on top of their classes.

2tor competes primarily with EmbanetCompass, which creates similar partnerships with academic institutions and helps colleges provide online degree programs. EmbanetCompass has partnered with 20 universities, including Northwestern, Howard, Wake Forest, and USC.

The fourth institutional round was led by Tondern Capital, an affiliate of Hillman Ventures, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Novak Biddle Venture Partners, and City Light Capital. The funding will be used for new academic partnerships.

2tor was founded in 2008 and is based in New York City. The company has raised a total of $96 million in funding.

Online degree keyboard image via Shutterstock

With more than 16 million registered users, Fantage is one of the rare successes among startups focusing on kids virtual worlds.

The Fort Lee, N.J.-based company has created a world where kids can chat, play mini games, and engage in activities such as virtual fashion shows. Now the company is shifting more explicitly into education, launching a new Fantage School Challenge on a school by school basis. This kind of intense focus on one school is a way that Fantage can improve the adoption of its virtual world, which has 2million monthly active users.

There used to be a ton of competition in kids virtual worlds from 2009 to 2011, with many of the worlds trying to copy the success of Club Penguin, which was acquired for $350 million (plus a $350 million earn out) in 2007. Moshi Monsters has also appeared on the scene as real competition. But most of the rivals have fallen by the way side.

Fantage targets a wide range of of ages, from 6 to 16, and its classroom-focused material focuses on math and language skills through mini games.

“Teachers like it because we enable students to learn while playing,” said David Hwang, chief executive of the company, in an interview.

Last year, the company invited a fifth grade class at the Christ the King school in Los Angeles to play Fantage educational games every day at school for an hour. The pilot program involved both online and offline competitions, and the winning team got a cash prize and an Amazon Kindle. It turned out to be a success and now the company is invited even more schools to participate in the Fantage Challenges.

Veronica Castillo, fifth grade teacher at the school, said, “Everyone in the classroom was excited to participate, and the School Challenge provided extra motivation for my students to focus on important subjects like math and geography.”

The company will roll out a new school each quarter. Two or three schools can compete with each other via the virtual classroom. The winning classroom gets a cash prize for the school. The goal is to enable schools to adopt the challenges by themselves, Hwang said. As word spreads among schools, they can organize their own challenges. Fantage has set up a challenge page for teachers.

“The pilot we ran showed children can get engaged because of the competition,” Hwang said. “We hope schools can use our site to do this indpendently.”

Fantage is also extending into separate sites for German and French speakers.

“We are very excited and have been preparing this for a few months,” Hwang said.

Fantage also plans to launch about one new app a month for mobile devices.

It also launched three apps on the iPhone and one app on Android last year. The Bullseye app in November had 100,000-plus downloads with no spending on marketing. The company is creating the apps in-house and is tailoring them for kids who are the same age as the players on the web site. Fantage was formed in 2007 and it has a few dozen employees. Investors include Nexon, but Fantage has not disclosed how much money it has raised.

“I can’t claim to be a Mother Teresa, but the fact that helping people is more important than making money is just reality,” he told us.

In 2006, Khan was working in the world of hedge funds. To help his young cousins who were struggling with science and math concepts in grade school, he started tutoring them remotely via a series of YouTube videos.

This work, which became known as the Khan Academy and has turned into his full-time job, was less about financial profit and more about helping people who desperately needed a higher quality education.

Today, five years later, Khan has made more than 2,600 micro-lessons and posted them on YouTube. They’re all free for anyone to watch; yet somehow, without revenue, Khan feels he is more successful than he was in the world of finance.

Now, Khan is addressing a room of industry professionals at the Future of State Universities Conference in Dallas, talking about how technology can be used to give everyone a better education. The conference brought together education influencers from around the world, including university heads, state governors and policy makers. Moments before he spoke to them, Khan took a moment to talk with VentureBeat, and he gave us some amazing insights about work, money, happiness and the value of helping others.

When he started the Khan Academy, he said, “Helping people felt good. Not good enough to quit my job, but all of the sudden, the idea that I could reach millions on a regular basis and transform their lives, it made a lasting impact. That mental model, being able to do that rather than racking up points on a scoreboard, it’s a no-brainer.”

Back in his hedge fund days, Khan said he saw financial gain as “a way for me to prove myself, a scoring mechanism.”

These days, thanks to the guidance of mentors who had plenty of money but placed a greater emphasis on morality and family, Khan said he sees wealth in a new light.

“If you have enough money to buy a house and a couple Hondas, you have everything you need. Beyond that, you should be optimizing for your happiness.”

Currently, the Khan Academy operates on funding from donations and support from various foundations, but Khan says, “The social ROI is pretty huge… We hope that it’s sustainable so we can stay 100 percent focused on the mission.”

He also notes that the Khan Academy is becoming a powerful brand name in education. “We’re delivering value. And there are models we can leverage while still keeping our core content free.”

We asked Khan what industries other than education could stand a good shake-up from the tech industry. “I think the big one is healthcare,” said Khan. “Both education and healthcare are a huge part of our society, and both, because of structural strangeness, have been hard to change.

“But it’s obvious there’s room for change. I suspect that the best way to help this industry is to rethink it from the ground up. I’m sure people thought that was very hard to do for education, but we created a clean slate.”

Khan finished off our conversation with a comment on one of the most powerful and overarching forces in the world: Political freedom.

“I think democracy itself is undergoing a transformation,” he said. “Look at what’s going on in the Middle East. Because of cross-border communication, it’s changing what it means to be a nation.”

Founder and CEO Steve Poizner (pictured), a Republican politician with roots in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur, was previously elected California’s Insurance Commissioner. He was also a candidate for the California gubernatorial election in 2010 but lost the June Primary to former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

One of the issues debated during Poizner’s candidacy was how the Baby Boomer generation will face their pending retirements. An estimated 71.5 million Americans will be 65 or older in 2030, representing nearly one-fifth of the total U.S. population, according to the Administration on Aging, a unit of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Poizner hopes they will depend less on Social Security and more on professional certificates and career counseling, which is why he started Encore.

Encore tailors online education courses provided by University of California at Los Angeles Extension (UCLA) to Baby Boomers seeking to advance their educations or find new jobs.

VentureBeat spoke with Encore’s lead investor Tom Rosch, a general partner at InterWest, today by phone.

“It was pretty obvious from the start that this was going to work,” says Rosch. “We have the opportunity to work with UCLA to build something that will do online education the right way. Rather than worry about building a brand we can rely on UCLA’s reputation. We can focus our investment on quality education content instead of branding.”

Encore is also partnering with The Sherry Lansing Foundation, which is working in late-career job training, and the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), an entertainment and sports agency which will use its star power to help Encore’s marketing and brand-building.

Encore acquired a team of marketers and engineers from eHarmony, and will use the dating site’s concept of match-making formulas to help Boomers find their ideal education and career paths.

“Encore will use questionnaires to figure out how people are learning; what’s working and what isn’t,” says Rosch. “We’ll also be ‘match-making’ in the sense that we’ll get successful students to help those that are struggling. Peer to peer video conferencing is something we will experiment with. We’re hoping to take this tailored program and make it work throughout their learning experience.”

Rosch says Poizner’s insurance connections are providing a valuable connection for Encore.

“We’re talking to California employers about what kinds of people they want and what jobs need to be filled, and some of the biggest employers are in the healthcare sector,” says Rosch, who says health insurance provider Kaiser Permanente is asking for grief counselors and people to help those with chronic health issues navigate insurance. These types of jobs are well suited to many Boomers who, while no longer caring for their children, are now looking after their own parents’ health care needs.

Poizner has more than 20 years experience as a technology entrepreneur, starting and running companies in Silicon Valley. Prior to politics, Poizner founded and served as CEO of Strategic Mapping a digital mapping software company. He then founded SnapTrack which pioneered technology that put GPS receivers into cell phones.

Poizner later turned his focus to education, co-founding EdVoice, an educational nonprofit organization dedicated to improving public schools and serving the interests of K-12 children in California. In 2003, Poizner co-founded the California Charter Schools Association.

Encore’s classes and services are expected to begin in Fall 2012.

Last week, New York was abuzz with Joel Klein’s move to step down as chancellor of the country’s biggest public-school system to join Murdoch’s News Corp. empire. While some ideologues may grouse about the notion of Fox News High, the move could signal good things for technology-infused education startups.

According to New York magazine, Klein “makes clear that he believes the ‘huge transformation in the field of education’ that is coming is ‘going to be driven by private markets’—by a wave of digital-learning start-ups now swelling around the country. And that, whether through investments or acquisitions, Murdoch intends to ride this wave.”

To date, investors have been skittish about education technology. Some money has gone into test-prep services like Knewton and Grockit, and a few teaching platforms like EduFire and Udemy. EduPath, an online-education startup designed around tablets, won the MobileBeat 2010 Startup Competition. But VC portfolios are for the most part education-free.

Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, says the problem is that few big companies are willing to buy startups. “In K-12 education the buyer is predominately state and local governments, as well as school districts,” Heesen wrote in an email. “None of these entities are awash in money to spend on new educational technology, no matter how forward thinking they are.”

Murdoch’s move may help, but Heesen doesn’t think it counts as a tipping point. “Potential acquirers certainly help a venture capitalist decide to invest in one space over another, but there has to be several major potential acquirers to really get their attention.”

That guarded optimism is the same reaction I got from Elizabeth Corcoran, former technology editor at Forbes and founder of e-learning startup Lucere. Corcoran, who’s been studying the sector in depth for the past two years, says Klein’s move may be more a sign of his personal goals than a sign of a coming windfall for edutech startups. Corcoran said:

The number of education-technology startups percolating is clearly on the rise. […] I’d agree that Klein’s decision to move to Murdoch’s camp amounts to him voting with his feet. Whether or not investing in these companies will benefit Murdoch’s “bottom line” seems like a declaration of faith at this point. The number of education-tech ventures which have hit the classic VC gold standard of a “10x” return are shockingly small.

When I asked Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital about the sector a few months back, he said there’s a market for education technology in places like Korea, where online tutors are treated like rock stars and take out billboard ads to boost their following. But there, parents are willing to spend their own money on supplementary education; not so in the U.S., Gurley said. Earlier this year, SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier likewise told me he just didn’t see the market to justify the early-stage investments his firm makes.

Still, Murdoch’s move his hard to ignore. He has an eye for undertapped revenue streams, like the underserved audience that religiously watches Fox News and the opportunity for satellite television overseas. It can’t have been lost on Murdoch, who famously watches the competition, that the Washington Post Co., whose flagship newspaper rarely sides with Fox News and with whom the News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal is increasingly competing with in national political coverage, is minting money in the education market through its Kaplan subsidiary.

Jumping into education is a gamble, but one that could pay off, Corcoran says: “You can argue that education is one of the last huge sectors of the economy to take advantage of digital technology, and so there will be fortunes to made — but history suggests this is difficult ground to harvest.”

And News Corp. has a mixed record when it comes to harvesting difficult ground. Take its MySpace subsidiary. When Murdoch bought it for $580 million in 2005, it was hailed as a visionary purchase — and a bargain. Now it’s losing money and News Corp. executives are talking about dumping it. Klein should take a lesson: Whatever he does had better make money fast.

EME International‘s mParent mobile application, which launches today at the DEMO conference, gives parents continuous access to information like a child’s grades, attendance, progress, activities and schedule. Parents can be alerted to homework, exams, absences and generally track their children’s progress.

Parental involvement in a child’s education has been shown to boost student learning and improve both behavior and attendance. One study from the University of New Hampshire concluded that schools would need to increase per-pupil spending by more than $1,000 in order to achieve the same results as those achieved by parental involvement.

mParent’s alerts pop up on the handset screen to highlight urgent information like school closures, safety alerts, illnesses, or even detentions. mParent also provides for greater parent involvement in school issues via surveys, comments and suggestions.

The application is currently available on the iPhone, Symbian devices like those made by Nokia, devices running Google’s Android operating system, RIM’s BlackBerry smartphones, and several others.

EME International was founded into 2004 in Egypt, is privately funded and has 20 employees.
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/980795693

A first glance Udemy looks like a mix between a social-networking and a video-sharing site. The creator of a “course” can upload presentations, videos, and even write blog posts. If a user finds a course they are particularly interested in, they can subscribe to it and ask questions via discussion boards. Lastly, creators can set up live virtual sessions with whiteboard, presentation viewer, chatroom, and file-sharing components available to use.

None of that may sound particularly unique, but the real difference may be the range of tools provided. For example, EduFire and Supercool School are really focused on live learning in virtual classrooms, not sharing educational content. A website-building service like Weebly, on the other hand, is all about sharing educational content, without a live or strong collaboration component.

California-based Udemy, founded in February 2010, has been in development for over a year and a half and has received no funding to date.

In an interview, Hastings explained why he got so excited about the Bellevue, Wash.-based company that he decided to buy it along with Charter Fund. He used his own personal money in the deal, the amount of which was not disclosed. But both Hastings and Charter Fund promised to invest $10 million in the company to help it expand into schools across the U.S.

DreamBox Learning has been successful in part because it designed its software to be adaptive. That means when kindergarten through third graders play the online math games, the software tracks their progress and adjust the game to match the difficulty of the lessons based on each child’s scores.

“It’s a big idea that will affect a broader market,” Hastings said. “But right now, our focus for this is the elementary school education market.”

Hastings has been a longtime philanthropist with an interest in education. He joined the Peace Corps after college and taught high school math in Swaziland, Africa. He returned to get a master’s degree in computer science and went on to start a number of startups, striking it rich with Pure Software. He then turned his off-work efforts to improving education and served as president of the California State Board of Education about a decade ago. He’s an advocate of charter schools and thus it’s no surprise he is jointly buying DreamBox with the nonprofit Charter Fund.

While there have been tons of failed education startups, including so-called “edutainment companies” that combine education and entertainment. Many education game companies have been criticized for being too instructional and not fun enough. But Hastings said that the opportunity to start anew in this space exists because startups can now launch their software online without a lot of friction and reach a wide number of users on the Web quickly. That gives education startups a better footing and a better chance to succeed this time around compared to early efforts.

Hastings said that he will serve as chairman of the 20-person startup and he is looking for a CEO with experience in  both education and technology companies.

As for the overall maturity of the online education market, Hastings said, “It’s early. It’s very early in the market. I tend to look for things too early. Like with Netflix, it was too early to stream video. We started with DVDs and moved to streaming. At some point, every child will have a netbook or an iPad. The early phase of that is targeting computer labs at schools and that is what we are doing.”

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